It Would Be Threatening... If Men Were Women.
"The spear in the Other's heart is the spear in your own - you are he." - Surak "...and knowing is half the battle!" - G.I. Joe The End of Men? It may be the end of men dying in steel mills, coal mines, and various other jobs that have been dangerous throughout the history of the Industrial Era, and some of those jobs remain dangerous... which is why men remain the predominant majority of employees in these fields. But the idea that men are, or ought to be, frightened by the need to stay home and take care of the house and kids is kind of laughable. If I face the choice of being drafted into war, or drafted into mopping the floor, this is not a hard choice. What's frightening to someone is that we might actually be really good at it. For every Joe Six-pack out there who defines his masculinity in terms of dragging his knuckles as loudly as possible, there are a dozen or so men who do vastly better at being social, sensitive, in short... civilized. We can type. P;D Use computers. Do math. Basically, all those carefully cultivated nerdy skills that will compel jocks to throw rocks at you because they have no hope of even making a good show of it -- these are the skills that define the new and wildly successful New Masculinity. I can stay at home, watch the kids watch 5000 channels of cable (without a single one of Mommy's Soap Operas to blight the landscape), program Baxter and Roomba to do the bulk of the worst chores, Wiki, blog, and chat with an international conspiracy... er, community of men, and use Make-a-Whatsis 3000 to create 90% of the things I might need around the house. (Mmmmmmm... Waffles!) Old Masculinity The argument that the Old Masculinity defined our species gory history has it backwards -- our gory history defined Masculinity (and Femininity as well). The world history of conquest, confiscation, slavery, feudalism, colonialism, client states, and all the other abuses of power existed because there were no effective checks on the use of power and violent force. No mass media, no awareness of events beyond what could be seen for oneself or heard second-hand; opinions, bare assertions, and gossip as shaped by the ever-present threat of tyranny. The history of science alone is rife with stories of accurate knowledge being bludgeoned into submission by the whim of authorities and institutions. Note that the history of science is full of men, such as, say, Galileo, being cowed by the church or some other institution. Real men have had to be subservient to dogs dancing on their hind legs throughout history, and real masculinity has mostly been a luxury that only the most fortunate of men have been able to afford. Until NOW. P;D One of the many signs of the impending death of old masculinity is the defeat of Mitt Romney and the Self-Righteous Republicans. It seems there are simply not enough people in America who look back fondly on the eight years of an illiterate, Bible-thumping peasant with delusions of grandeur to revisit those glory days anew. Carl Rove took such exception to logic piercing the warped bubble of his personal reality that he, pathetically, argued with the validity of the polls as conducted by the statisticians of the Right's own lap-dog, Fox News. This, then, is the apex of a culture which from this point on, can only experience a hideously overdue decline. Category:The End of Men Category:Feminism Category:Men's rights Category:Stay-at-home dad Category:The End of Men?